Review – Temper
On Friday evening, at The Producer’s Bar, Point & Flex Circus put on a remarkable circus-slash-theatre performance, demonstrating a wide variety of skills – from bottle walking to juggling, contortion and glass-eating. The four performers, all graduates of Adelaide’s Cirkidz program, were incredibly loveable and stage-ready, with just the right amount of cheeky gall to charm the audience.
An adventurous show, it shifted rapidly between circus tricks and more theatrical moments – and, at times, that venture was a little shaky. The theatrical elements didn’t seem to be comfortably broken into shorter skits, which clashed with the clear segmented nature of the circus aspects; meanwhile, the cast were too obviously good friends, which meant that their faux anger at one another oscillated between moments of believable calamity and more transparent camaraderie. Neither of these would have been particularly big issues were it not for the introductory voiceover, which tried to force the audience into reverence with a short bit of definition-based poetry about the word ‘temper’ that just sounded like someone reading from a dictionary.
The performance would have been much better if it had focused on the talents of its actors – not by removing the theatrical side of it altogether, but rather utilising the bond of trust forged between circus performers to reach some other, clearer artistic goal, and relying more on the charisma of these talented young people to carry the show. This charisma was most evident in the ‘food game’, a defining moment of the show that almost entirely broke away from circus tricks.
Altogether, though, Temper was a triumph of circus performance and of theatre, and moreover a triumph of four brilliant young performers that will clearly go far. Point and Flex are an act to watch.
